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A Beautiful mind

Kelly’s innovations led him on the path to Oregon

By Rob Moseley

The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Sunday, July 19, 2009, page C1

DURHAM, N.H. — On a bright day this spring in the Field House on the University of New Hampshire campus, head football coach Sean McDonnell sat at his desk lunching on a salad, pausing to recall the instant in that same office years before when Chip Kelly took perhaps the first significant step on his path to Oregon.

It certainly didn’t seem momentous at the time. The Wildcats were at a crossroads, but who knew then that taking the path they did would eventually lead Kelly all the way across the country?

In hindsight, though, it makes perfect sense. That moment called for Kelly to draw on all the skills that would make him one of college coaching’s brightest new stars, and ultimately lead to his being named the Ducks’ head coach, replacing Mike Bellotti.

Confidence. Creativity. Charisma. Energy. Ingenuity. Intelligence.

All those qualities were on display that day in 1999, Kelly’s first year as New Hampshire’s offensive coordinator after five seasons as a position coach. All induced Bellotti to name Kelly as Oregon’s coach-in-waiting in December, and all, too, will be on display when Kelly leads the Ducks onto the field for his first game at the helm, Sept. 3 at Boise State.

Back in McDonnell’s office in 1999, the longtime friends and associates were trying to figure out how to overcome the graduation of all-America tailback Jerry Azumah, the first player in Division I-AA (now FCS) history with four 1,000-yard rushing seasons. The Wildcats had been a traditional power running team, using a zone blocking scheme that Kelly had introduced as offensive line coach.

But with Azumah gone, and athletic passer Ryan Day in line to take over at quarterback as a sophomore, Kelly looked at the depth chart and figured change was in order.

“He said, ‘Mac, why are we playing this kid, just for the sake of playing him?’ ” McDonnell recalled.

In other words, Kelly was asking, why go with a guy at one position just because he fits the old scheme, when you’ve got a wealth of talent elsewhere whose only drawback is that it doesn’t fit the scheme as well?

“I said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ ” McDonnell recalled, between bites of his salad. “ ‘How are we going to run the ball?’

“He goes, ‘I don’t know. But I’ll go find a way.’ ”

Kelly took to the road, visiting several schools that incorporated spread-option concepts. That fall, using the new scheme, New Hampshire finished a game better than the year before and raised its scoring average by a touchdown a game, despite the loss of Azumah.

Kelly’s genius for offensive football was affirmed.

Ten years later, the Ducks hope it will be reaffirmed in Eugene. But before Chip Kelly attempts to make history at Oregon, it’s worth looking back at his own.

A thinking quarterback

Kelly, 45, is loath to discuss his life off the field. When he’s asked questions that even hint at requiring self-analysis, you can almost hear his eyes rolling.

But others are more than happy to fill in the blanks.

“I’m really proud to say I coached him, and to call him a friend,” said Bob Leonard, Kelly’s coach in football and track at Manchester (N.H.) Central High School. “He was in my wedding. Since day one, we’ve been friends. He’s the best.”

Kelly was a star in both sports for Leonard, but his athletic background traces back much further. He is the third of four brothers, all athletes. Their parents supported the boys’ athletic endeavors; their father, Paul, later became a regular presence at UNH football practices when Kelly played there.

The other three brothers stuck mostly with individual sports; Keith, who is two years older than Chip, is an accomplished distance runner who once was the top finisher from New Hampshire in the Boston Marathon.

But team sports were Chip Kelly’s calling. He played CYO basketball, and was a rugged winger in the Manchester Regional Youth Hockey Association. Truth be told, hockey was Kelly’s first love, but he was better at football, which ultimately became the focus of his energies.

“I was always just enamored with it,” Kelly said in a rare moment of public self-reflection. “I think it’s just the competitive nature. You wanted to win, so how are you going to figure out ways to win? That’s what it was all about.”

At Manchester Central, Kelly ran the second leg on a 4x100-meter relay team that once held the New England record, Leonard said. Quick feet made Kelly a whiz through the turn, and helped him in football as well. He took over at quarterback for Central’s “Little Green” — a nod to nearby Dartmouth College’s Big Green — as a sophomore, also playing safety.

“He won’t tell you this — he’ll say ‘I wasn’t this, I wasn’t that’ — but he had great speed,” Leonard said. “He was only about 5-foot-9, 170 pounds, but he had a great sense about him, offensively and defensively.”

Kelly was Leonard’s coach on the field. As a safety, he made sure none of the other defenders was beaten for big plays. Offensively, he blossomed after being switched from running back.

“When he moved to quarterback, there was just no stopping him,” Leonard said. “He understood what we did so well, and he understood what the people across the way were doing. And he just made one miraculous play after another.”

Kelly put his quick feet to use in an offense developed at Syracuse, which thrived using rollout passes. Even now, Leonard says, he sees hints of that scheme in what Kelly does at Oregon, getting his quarterbacks outside the pocket where they can see the whole field and throw on the run.

Back then, locals in Manchester compared Kelly with Minnesota Vikings legend Fran Tarkenton, for his toughness and ability to escape the pocket. Mentally, Kelly’s command of the game was also high.

“He would look to the sideline for a play, and more often than not I’d just point to him and say, ‘You make the call,’ ” Leonard said.

Later on at New Hampshire, as both a player and coach, Kelly developed a respect for the importance of the running game as the bedrock of offensive football. But at Central, Leonard said, it was the other aspect of offense that intrigued Kelly.

“Chip believed right from the get-go that if you threw the ball, good things were going to happen,” Leonard said. “And being his high school coach, I witnessed that. He threw the ball when other people wouldn’t. It gave me pause on more than one night. But he never threw into trouble.”

As a senior, Kelly was named all-state at quarterback. That fall, after a Thanksgiving Day game, Leonard told the team he wasn’t returning as head coach.

Kelly’s response? “No, don’t do it — I want to coach with you some day,” he told Leonard.

“He knew from the time he first stepped on the field,” Leonard says now, “that he wanted to be a coach.”

A way with offense

After graduating from Central, Kelly walked on at New Hampshire for legendary coach Bill Bowes. Though Kelly’s speed didn’t translate well to the college level, he caught on as a reserve defensive back.

“You put him out there as a corner on a fast wide receiver, you were holding your breath,” Bowes said this spring over a soda in his favorite Durham coffee shop. “But he was the kind of kid that you wanted on the team, that was going to be there every day, practice hard every day, set the tone for everyone else.”

Put another way: “Chip knows the work end of the shovel,” Leonard said.

While playing for Bowes, who coached the Wildcats from 1972-98, Kelly didn’t betray his future coaching intentions. But he impressed Bowes enough to get a partial scholarship, a hard-earned feat under the tough former offensive line coach.

“Usually when I gave those out, they would be to a walk-on kid that you thought maybe had the potential to be a starter,” Bowes said. “But in his case, I wanted him to stay on the team. I wanted him to hang with it.”

Kelly ended up earning some playing time with the Wildcats, then returned home to Manchester. He was named offensive coordinator at Central, where his old coach, Bob Leonard, was back on the staff coaching defense.

Still enamored with slinging the ball down the field, Kelly would sometimes confound Leonard with the frequency with which his offense went three-and-out. But already, Leonard was seeing Kelly’s creativity at work.

Later, when Kelly turned dual-threat quarterback Ricky Santos into a spread-option demon at New Hampshire, and when he ran the Statue of Liberty play for a touchdown in his first season as Oregon’s offensive coordinator, at Michigan in 2007, it all looked familiar to Leonard.

“He had an idea of where this thing was going a long time ago,” Leonard said of Kelly’s offensive philosophy. “Every one of those ‘plays of the week,’ he saved those from somewhere. Every now and again I’ll be watching him coach and I’ll think, ‘Yep, you came back with that one, I remember where that came from.’ But he put it all together in a different package.

“And when the (quarterback) goes out on the field to run this offense, the kid really is in charge, because Chip makes him in charge. That’s what Chip can do: He can make other people do things that even they don’t know they’re capable of doing.”

Such as Dennis Dixon, who lost the UO starting job in 2006, then blossomed into a Heisman candidate under Kelly in 2007.

“And he’s been doing that since day one, even as a player,” Leonard said.

Student of the game

Sean McDonnell, who last fall completed his 10th season as head coach at New Hampshire, first encountered Kelly when he was still the quarterback at Manchester Central and McDonnell was an assistant at Manchester West.

From 1985-87, McDonnell worked at Boston University, and Kelly asked to drop in and study some of that staff’s philosophies.

That began a long tradition of Kelly traveling to other schools, personal homework assignments that included a 2006 visit to Oregon, setting in motion Kelly’s joining the UO staff a year later.

“He was like a sponge,” McDonnell recalled. “Every time he went someplace, he wanted to soak up what they were doing.”

McDonnell later moved on to Columbia, and in 1990 he greased the wheels for Kelly to get out of Manchester and coach freshman football at the Ivy League school. A group of coaches shared an apartment near Morningside Park in New York, and Kelly “was like a hayseed” upon being introduced to the big city, McDonnell said.

One night, McDonnell said, “he kept hearing these cracking sounds. He goes, ‘Firecrackers, huh?’ One of the guys from New York says, ‘Firecrackers? Those are gunshots!’ ”

McDonnell returned to New Hampshire, where he’d also been a player, in 1991, narrowly missing Gary Crowton, who had just completed a three-year stint as offensive coordinator there and who would later precede Kelly at Oregon. In 1994, McDonnell took over as offensive coordinator and hired Kelly, the start of a 13-year working relationship at UNH.

Kelly started out as running backs coach, working with Azumah. Then, in 1997, Bowes needed to hire an offensive line assistant. A former line coach himself, Bowes was particular about the men who handled the position on his staff. In an audacious move, Kelly applied for the job.

“He had the gumption to come in and say, ‘Hey coach, I am really interested in that position,’” Bowes said. “I think it was his way of learning more. That was my strength.”

By then renowned for his work ethic, particularly in the film room, Kelly approached McDonnell about a zone rushing scheme that he’d picked up at clinics and in conversations with coaches elsewhere. Using the new scheme that fall, Azumah ran for a school-record 1,585 yards. The next year, as a senior, Azumah ran for 2,195.

In 1999, Azumah graduated, McDonnell replaced Bowes as head coach, and Kelly was promoted to offensive coordinator. After meeting with McDonnell, Kelly scrapped the record-setting offense and started again from scratch.

The next season, Day began a meteoric three-year run as New Hampshire’s quarterback. The prolific numbers he put up were later surpassed by Ricky Santos, who holds UNH records in attempts, completions and yards and who, in Kelly’s last season at UNH in 2006, won the Walter Payton Award as the nation’s best I-AA player.

In eight seasons with Kelly as coordinator, the Wildcats averaged 400 yards of offense per game seven times. They set school records for total offense in 2004, and scoring in 2005.

“You have to hand it to him,” Bowes said from his booth in the Durham coffee shop. “Chip is very insightful, and not pretentious. Gary Crowton had a good offensive mind, and Chip has taken that and expanded that, created new things, new concepts, new offensive ideas. And I think Chip will continue to do that. He has a mind for offensive football.

“He’s bright enough to know you have to match your offense with the talent you have. Not all coaches have that — the ability to make changes or adaptations, and the foresight to analyze and evaluate the personnel you have, and create the best offense for your personnel.

“Some of that is being stubborn, and some of it is not being inventive, not understanding the game that well. They don’t have that ability. They take what they’ve learned, but they cannot create themselves. Chip is one of those guys that can create. And I don’t think there are many guys in college that are creative themselves.

“They’re copycats. They’ll go other places and copy what other people do. Chip has done that. But he also has the ability to be creative himself.”

‘A smart guy’

Despite all that, it took a while for the rest of the nation to take notice of the gaudy numbers New Hampshire was putting up under Kelly.

“There wasn’t a big buzz,” McDonnell recalled.

McDonnell said Kelly interviewed with Randy Edsall at Connecticut, and turned down Tom Coughlin and the New York Giants because Kelly got no assurances a quality control job would eventually earn him a promotion to the field.

All the while, Kelly was traversing the country, participating in clinics, and visiting the likes of Clemson and Northwestern to pick up new offensive wrinkles.

“He interned in Canada one year for three weeks, and came back with all these funky motions and stuff like that,” McDonnell said with a touch of amazement.

Kelly was an aggressive coordinator who would get spitting mad when McDonnell called for field-goal attempts. After 20 years studying the game, he was confident, and creative, and charismatic, and energetic, and ingenious.

And, McDonnell stressed, don’t forget intelligent.

“That’s a point that gets mixed up in all this,” McDonnell said. “You can be a hard worker, you can be an energetic person, but he’s a smart guy. He knows kids, knows people. He has a good sense for that.”

In 2006, Kelly took one of his annual forays to another school, this time meeting former UNH coordinator Crowton at Oregon. A year later Crowton left for LSU, and Kelly was back in Eugene to interview with Bellotti.

“I knew when he walked through the door after the interview that he wasn’t long for this place anymore,” McDonnell said. “If Bellotti offered him the job, he was gone. He really liked Mike.”

It was mutual, and Bellotti named Kelly as Oregon’s offensive coordinator. What followed were the two most prolific offensive seasons in school history, exploiting both the versatility of quarterbacks Dixon and Jeremiah Masoli and a punishing running game. It was the passing game of Kelly’s heart combined with the ground game he came to embrace.

Now, Kelly is making the transition to head coach. If there’s any question about his ability to thrive in that role, it’s whether the master schematic coach can handle all the administrative duties associated with the job.

“He’ll be good at it,” McDonnell said, “because he was good at it here. When we had to have him talk to a bunch of alumni, he’s got a sharp memory and can connect with people.

“The biggest thing is, knowing Chip, he’ll be able to surround himself with people who can do things that he would probably not like to do.”

Missing from that list is play calling. Kelly has said he intends to do that this season, despite hiring Mark Helfrich as offensive coordinator. McDonnell said he wouldn’t be surprised if Kelly is still calling plays five years from now.

Those are his roots, after all. Roots that stretch back to Manchester, N.H., and that could thrive and flourish as never before in Eugene.